A bureaucracy has been defined as an organization in which anyone can say no and no-one can say yes. The US Navy’s inability to build a new generation of warships is a classic example.
While China outbuilds the US by about two orders of magnitude, the unfortunate US Navy finds itself unable to accomplish anything. In today’s absence of any US capability to design a warship, there was an effort to use an Italian design, but by the time every bureaucrat had tweaked her own little bit of the vessel, it had become an obvious failure.
And thus the US turned to the non-Chinese military giants – Japan, South Korea, Turkey – to seek help in building new ships. But the US Congress has intervened to prevent that from happening.
It took half a century for our lawyers and politicians to drive the US into such a mess. It would take about half a century to dig our way out, if the political will existed to make some of the necessary decisions.
In the meantime, the realistic answer would be for Congress to relieve the US Navy of the burden of trying to rule the world’s oceans. Congress could pull the US out of entangling alliances and allow the Navy to focus strictly on defending the US coasts with the limited capabilities it still has. But Congress – the lawyerly Master of Bureaucracy – is the last place one should expect to find common sense.
Do we really lack the capability to design or is it that we are looking for a quick fix by seeking an existing design?
Did the need to redesign the FREMM indicate that perhaps the Europeans lacked design competence? It’s not like they actually intend their navies to fight.
FREMM = “One size fits none”, yes? If history is ever recorded, it will undoubtedly show the inevitable collapse visible on the horizon with the naked eye - for those merely willing to glance in that direction. As I’ve recounted about “Clarkson’s Farm” the UK bureaucracy is clearly intent on destroying domestic food production, particularly by extirpating the family farm. They don’t even bother pretending there’s any justification in the “public good” or some such. The last episode of the series showed how a single cow tested “indeterminate” in its highly subjective and subject to extremely wide variability in interpreting, skin “test” for TB. The cow and her two in utero calves were BY RULE slaughtered and the herd and farm put under isolation. That has unsurprisingly resulted in the bankruptcy of MANY former family farms. Does the state “care”? (As in health”care”?). Notwithstanding the contorted posturing, verbiage and “public safety” admonitions, this is really about iron clad control; jump. Jump this many inches (to the nearest 1/32nd). You’re off by a 32nd of an inch, send in your appeal in quadruplicate, hard copy, blue ink only! We’ll have a determination by this time in 2028. BTW, though it’s entirely irrelevant to the state, autopsies conclusively demonstrated the absence of TB in the needlessly-executed cow.
Not with a bang, but with many whimpers - from families which work extraordinarily hard to put food on the table of the bureaucrats who are literally killing them (softly, of course; by arcane rules, not by any individual, accountable act). The state is strangling - always carefully couched in the abstract language of safety and public good (abstract references - not actual human beings) - the domestic producers of nutrition of the entire UK. These officials purportedly represent their soon to be starving “electorate” (don’t they use the same voting machines which mystically condensed about 11 million Biden votes from the aether?). They can surely rationalize the starvation result since it’s a three for one: fights obesity, overpopulation and global warming at one stroke! It would be hard to imagine better policy! Mum! Come quick! The gov’nor broke the farm!
BTW, if I said this in the UK, I would probably be in jail already. The enforcement apparatus against speech the rulers dislike is quite “beefy” (pun intended). I note that Jeremy Clarkson is quite circumspect in what he says about the various agencies’ “police” actions on the show. Unfortunately for me, I’m not a member of a “protected” group (everyone knows who these are). Members of such groups can say - and in many cases actually DO - awful, downright illegal things and face zero enforcement. My demographic is not only not protected, my demographic is THE problem because some of us point out the blatant double standards and flaming hypocrisy. Pointing that out is automatically “conspiracy theory” or racist “backlash”.
Things just could not be more dispiriting or despairing - like Leonard Cohen’s prescient song “Everybody Knows”- way ahead its time.
Good question. The little I know about this situation is that the US definitely lacked the capacity to come up with a design. It is unclear if that was because of unclear specifications, changing specifications, inadequate diversity on the part of the design staff, or simple unfamiliarity with the process of designing a new ship since Our Betters offshored that capacity. That failure led to the plan to buy an existing design from the Euros.
Rather than take the Italian design and build it, the same bureaucracy which had failed to design a ship from scratch then started messing with the design, changing dimensions, adding weight in the wrong places. Someone recognized that the modified design, if built, would be unstable – not good in a ship.
Presumably there is a whole story about what happened to the guy who blew the whistle on the redesign – but that is not public information.
Incorrect. The entire point was that the mandate was to use an existing foreign design. The issue was the unrealistic assumptions that it could easily be just slightly modified to serve with a US carrier battle group
You may be correct – but why did Congress impose that mandate? There was a track record of US Navy new designs failing to meet their objectives, which does not speak well of US Navy design capabilities.
And what kind of mandate was it that said use an existing foreign design … and then make substantial changes to it? Those changes completely destroyed the rationale for using an existing proven foreign design – as the abandonment of the project has demonstrated, while also demonstrating the poor quality of the design upgrades the US Navy tried to make.
Bottom line in the naval world is that China smiles; Japan smiles; South Korea smiles; Turkey smiles; probably even the Italians smile. But not many smiling faces on US Navy ships.